Three weeks ago, I participated in a fantastic symposium organized by Mila Burns and Jonathan Brown as part of the triennial Congreso Internacional de Americanistas held this year in Salamanca, Spain. The symposium explored the influence of Latin Americans on the Cold War, an important intervention in a field that has more often approached the relationship from the opposite direction. At one point in the discussion, Alan McPherson gave concise expression to something that many were feeling. The more closely you look at the Cold War in Latin America, he observed, the less of the Cold War you see.1 I’ve long been inclined to agree. After all, to riff on McPherson’s comment, the big questions that marked the politics of the region from World War II through the 1980s were not primarily “Cold War” questions. Is the U.S. an imperialist power? How should resources be distributed? Whose interests should be advanced by the state, and how should violence be deployed in their service? The answers to these questions were surely colored by the struggle for supremacy between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. as it unfolded, but in most cases, they were not determined by it.
The ensuing conversation got me thinking about the very meaning of the term “cold war,” in light of a fascinating 1960 document I saw at Rio de Janeiro’s Escola Superior de Guerra (ESG, or Superior War College) last July. Founded in 1949 and modeled explicitly on the U.S. National War College, the ESG functioned as a military-civilian think tank and was responsible, more than any other institution, for developing the Brazilian instantiation of the “national security doctrine” that would give shape to the country’s 1964-1985 dictatorship and in turn influence parallel regimes in Bolivia, Uruguay, Chile, and elsewhere.
Cruder analyses paint the ESG as something of a U.S. satellite campus, a locus for the transmission of a doctrine devised up north. But this isn’t at all what I saw while working in its library last year. While U.S. influence was evident in many of the ESG lectures, conferences, and curricula I consulted — particularly those from the school’s intelligence course — on the whole, ESG students and officials showed far greater interest in French conceptions of counterrevolutionary war, and they borrowed eagerly from the British and the Portuguese as well. Operating within a continental system unambiguously dominated by the United States, in the 1950s and 1960s, esguianos (as those connected to the center were called) wove these diverse stems into a unique basket of strategies and tactics, in turn giving form to a security state distinct from any that had come before. (For the best treatment in English of the ESG, see Benjamin Cowen’s excellent 2016 book, Securing Sex.)
The 1960 document I had in mind offers unusually direct insight into what “cold war” meant at the ESG. It is a report of a symposium on the topic of revolutionary war, one of a series of annual events at which the students of the school’s various courses discussed major topics. Each symposium culminated in a written exercise. At the 1960 event, the students of the Curso de Estado-Maior Conjunto (Joint General Staff Course) were divided into four teams of approximately ten members each and asked to “characterize (communist) revolutionary war in relation to so-called cold war, psychological war, and insurrectional or subversive war.”
The first page of the symposium report.
In the more than 60 pages that they submitted in response, the four teams agreed that Brazil, like other non-communist countries, was engaged in a “political, economic and pyscho-social” cold war waged by international communism. The groups did not define this uncapitalized cold war in terms of the confrontation between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. The former country, in fact, went unmentioned in the essays, though the latter was referenced frequently. Instead, as Team A explained, cold war was the “orienting idea” of global communism and the instrument through which it sought to achieve “its unlimited political objectives.” Team B, the only one to specify any sources for its definition of the concept, cited British Air Marshall Robert Saundby and French Colonel Jean Némo in support of a similar characterization.
While cold war was both broad and ongoing, all four teams focused the bulk of their attention on one of its “facets” in particular. As the very framing of the exercise suggests, this facet was revolutionary war. Several of the groups cited French officers Gabriel Bonnet and Jacques Hogard to characterize revolutionary war as the principal instrument, in the context of cold war, by which the Bolshevik revolution sought to conquer the world. Its agents, the students claimed, would deploy the tactics of psychological warfare to both weaken and win the sympathy of the population, with the ultimate the aim of launching “insurrectional or subversive war” at specific places and times. Numerous ESG documents explored this two-phase sequence in far greater detail, identifying five discrete sub-stages of revolutionary war and proposing strategies and tactics appropriate to each. (The most compelling research on this subject has been done by Brazilian historian João Roberto Martins Filho.)
In sum, though these students of the Joint General Staff Coursesaw revolutionary war as a facet of cold war, they gave much greater weight to the former and defined both in ways that owed vastly more to France and (to a lesser degree) Britain than to the U.S. This tendency held across most of the school’s doctrinal documents — though not, I should stress, those connected to the ESG’s intelligence course, where U.S. influence was stronger.
I make this observation not because I read in the words of these esguianos anything incompatible with the hemispheric role that the U.S. military sought for Brazil. Yet it is nonetheless significant that in their essays, all four teams cast Brazil not as a subsidiary participant in a standoff between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, but as a country on the front lines of a global war. In 1960, this conflict may still have been limited to psychological warfare, but “insurrectional or subversive war” represented an ongoing and imminent risk. Open — if typically small-scale — combat would indeed arrive in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a reaction to the military’s own “Revolution of 1964.” And when it did, it should hardly be surprising that a dictatorship born of the ESG would respond most immediately in the terms not of cold but of counterrevolutionary war.
I learned that former U.S. torture-center supervisor Gina Haspel would become the new head of the Central Intelligence Agency at an impossibly apt moment. I’ve just come back to New York after more than a year and a half abroad, and I spent Monday at the main branch of the New York Public Library to fill a hole in my research. The gap concerned the Movimiento Argentino Antiimperialista de Solidaridad Latinoamericana (MAASLA, the Argentine Anti-Imperialist Movement for Latin American Solidarity), a virtually unstudied Buenos Aires-based group that denounced repression and torture as explicitly transnational phenomena from 1972 to 1976. (They even used the word “transnational” itself; anyone who’s written a history grant recently will understand how exciting this is!)
I knew that in 1974, MAASLA had published a 40-page pamphlet titled “La CIA. ¿Qué es? ¿Qué hace en América Latina?” (“The CIA. What is it? What does it do in Latin America?”), with a skull-faced Statue of Liberty on its cover. Together with the table of contents, this was the only part of the document that I had seen; “La CIA” itself was missing from the Argentine archive where I’d learned of its existence. Fortunately the microform reading room at the main branch is the domain of miracles, and in place of acute curiosity and I now have a digital copy from microfiche.
As you may have begun to suspect, Lady Death was smiling at me from my computer screen as my phone buzzed Tuesday morning with the news that torture enthusiast Mike Pompeo would replace Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, and that Haspel in turn would lead the CIA. This coincidence was striking not simply because MAASLA’s 1974 pamphlet concerns the CIA, but because it emerged as part of the CIA’s first major scandal, which began to unfold publicly that same year. At a moment when the darkest stretches of the CIA’s gloomy past are showing with unusual clarity through the whitewash of the Obama years, I’d like to remember MAASLA and its efforts to turn up the heat in Latin America as the CIA faced an unprecedentedly broad attack at home.
The CIA had dealt with public-relations challenges before 1974, of course. The botched Bay of Pigs operation in 1961 and the discovery six years later of agency links to dozens of nominally independent groups like the Congress for Cultural Freedom are just two among many public revelations that had battered “the Company,” as the CIA likes to call itself.
Yet even by those standards 1974 was an outstandingly rough year for U.S. intelligence operations. With the Company already tarnished by public recognition of its involvement in Nixon’s Watergate burglary, in June of ’74, Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks — formerly of the CIA and State Department, respectively — published a book called The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. In it the two authors accused the Company of abandoning run-of-the-mill intelligence work in favor of complex and often inept covert operations designed to further U.S. imperial designs. Accounts had also begun to circulate concerning an upcoming tell-all book by CIA defector Philip Agee, to be published the following year in London under the title, Inside the Company. Agee had been stationed in Mexico, Ecuador, and Uruguay, and it was understood that he was going to name names (as indeed he would).
In the meantime some of Agee’s more damning anecdotes — among them accounts of CIA efforts to destabilize Salvador Allende’s government in Chile — had already leaked, including in a September 30, 1974 article in Time magazine, adding color to charges of U.S. interference abroad that had been all but confirmed by President Gerald Ford just weeks before.Even more damningly, in December New York Times journalist Seymour Hersh got a hold of parts of a 700-page internal CIA memo baptized “the Family Jewels.” As Hersh explained on the front page of the Times, the memo documented dozens of illegal activities undertaken by the CIA over the previous two decades, including assassination attempts against foreign leaders and domestic surveillance of U.S. citizens. (After countless Freedom of Information Act requests, the Family Jewels were finally declassified in 2007, so you can take a look for yourself — it doesn’t get much juicier than this.)
The September 30, 1974 cover of Time magazine. MAASLA cited this issue repeatedly in its report on the CIA. [From Time.com]These journalistic revelations fed an increasing Congressional interest in the CIA’s activities, leading to repeated closed-session testimony by CIA Director William Colby in 1974 and the formation of Senator Frank Church’s Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities the following year. Mounting awareness of the Company and its methods would play a major role in the growing disillusionment within the U.S. regarding policing and intelligence activities at home and abroad, but decades before the ascent of digital media there was no guarantee that these revelations would reach, let along reverberate in, the countries on the receiving end of the CIA’s destabilization efforts.
That is where MAASLA enters the picture. As the CIA’s “dirty tricks” were starting to leak, Argentina was experiencing a remarkable political moment. The dictatorship that had dominated the country since 1966 had been voted out of power in March 1973, and in its place, democratically elected President Héctor Cámpora had brought the left wing of the movement led by long-exiled former President Juan Perón into power for the very first time. While Cámpora would be made to step down after less than two months in office to clear the way for Perón’s personal return to the presidency in September, for a brief moment in mid-1973, it seemed that the entire Argentine political world had shifted far to the Left, and that revolution was just around the corner. This feeling lingered even as Perón turned decisively to the Right once in office, its permanence aided by the thousands of left-wing refugees from military-led Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, and Brazil who had poured into the country. Even as Argentine political violence increased precipitously over the course of 1974, Buenos Aires stood out as a bastion of comparative freedom for the Left in a region offering few alternatives.
Amid this transnational churn, MAASLA emerged as an Argentine center for exile activism. While its executive leadership and national board were comprised predominantly of Argentine artists, academics, and politicians from the Left and Center-Left, MAASLA built strong connections with committees of exiles working to denounce political crimes in neighboring countries, and many of its own volunteers were exiles themselves. MAASLA expanded on the work of the coalition of groups that had sought to destabilize Argentina’s own recent dictatorship through the defense of political prisoners and the denunciation of its practices of “repression and torture”. Appeals on behalf of political prisoners were MAASLA’s bread and butter, salted liberally with accusations of systematic counterrevolutionary violence.
A poster for a 1973 MAASLA event on behalf of Paraguayan political prisoners. [From the archives of the Fondazione Basso.]Unlike those earlier “repression and torture”-centered organizations, however, MAASLA framed its denunciations not in Argentine but rather in transnational terms. That so many Latin American countries were now governed by repressive military dictatorships was not “the result of the capriciousness of one dictator or another,” MAASLA’s leaders wrote in November 1972. Instead, these regimes “are guided by a common doctrine and by similar methods,” all of which harkened to the “doctrine of the ‘internal front,’ developed by the Pentagon.” 1
For MAASLA, the similarities among the repressive methods employed in these different countries underscored their common origin: “the same aberrant criminal techniques are instilled in ‘experts’ in repression at the police schools of [the] Panama [Canal Zone] and Washington,” they wrote. The effectiveness of this counterrevolutionary system was further enhanced by the “million-dollar budgets” of the CIA and related U.S. agencies, which play a “papel principalísimo” — a decidedly principal role — “in the commission of the crimes that we have denounced.”
MAASLA’s interpretation of regional repression would only be reinforced in 1973, as Uruguay and Chile joined Paraguay and Bolivia on the list of southern South American countries governed by military juntas. The Chilean coup in particular led MAASLA to call in September 1973 for the unmasking of “the common enemy that arms the fascists: yankee imperialism and its most direct agent, the fascist government of Brazil.”
This reference to Brazil was hardly a throwaway; indeed, the country held an increasingly privileged place in denunciations of South American repression as a transnational phenomenon. MAASLA documents make frequent reference to Brazil’s “mini-imperialism” in South America, citing Brazilian diplomats and security officials as they criss-crossed the region, facilitating coups and training their executors in the repressive techniques that had turned Brazil’s military government, in power since 1964, into a “model” for counterrevolution.
This belief in Brazil’s key role in the Right’s violent South American advance led MAASLA to collaborate intimately in the organization of the Second Russell Tribunal (1974-1976), a series of Europe-based hearings patterned on the First Russell Tribunal’s moral condemnation of U.S. war crimes in Vietnam. Russell II was originally planned to center only on Brazil, but after the Chilean coup its purview was extended to include the whole of the region. Nearly a year before Allende’s overthrow, MAASLA was urging that the scope of the tribunal be expanded. Much of MAASLA’s correspondence with the tribunal’s organizers concerned its efforts to include more Latin Americans in Russell II and to keep the focus of the hearings squarely on the linkages among South America’s military regimes, all of which pointed due north via Brazil to the United States.
The third and final session of Russell II. [From Brazil’s Memorial da Anistia.]MAASLA’s case for U.S. coordination of the Latin American counterrevolution became much stronger with the CIA leaks of 1974. The group’s CIA pamphlet referenced at the start of this post was printed before Hersh’s seminal December 1974 article about the “family jewels,” but it was nonetheless informed by a thorough reading of the substantial sources then available. Cited prominently throughout the report, these sources include the September 30 Time cover article depicted above, fragments of confidential testimony as well as public declarations by high U.S. officials as reported by the press, and The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. MAASLA also cited information gleaned from a remarkable conference on CIA covert action organized by the Center for National Security Studies and held September 12 and 13, 1974, in a Congressional hearing room on Capitol Hill, which was attended by journalists, academics, and even CIA Director Colby himself.
The central message of the well-sourced pamphlet, directed primarily to Argentine readers, was clear: it could happen here. Page after page documented past CIA incursions in the region, from the overthrow of Guatemalan reformist Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 to the more than decade-long financing of Allende’s Chilean opponents. The CIA was not the only U.S. agency devoted to destabilizing Latin America, the pamphlet contended; indeed, an organizational chart on page 8 includes numerous groups, among them the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and the Agency for International Development, responsible for the training of foreign police.
In cataloguing the activities of these groups, MAASLA did not shy away from naming names, and the pamphlet included deep dives into the personal histories of important intelligence figures. The last of these individuals to be profiled was then-current U.S. Ambassador to Argentina Robert C. Hill, who had previously been instrumental in the coup against Arbenz. Argentina had been encircled by repressive military dictatorships, and now its U.S. ambassador was an old hand at regime change. Without constant vigilance and firm political opposition, MAASLA insisted, Argentina would be next to fall.
In broad strokes, MAASLA was not wrong. In the months following the publication of “La CIA,” paramilitary violence against the Argentine Left increased vertiginously, much of it under the banner of a diffuse state-linked organization called the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance, or Triple A — a death squad similar in operation to units previously formed in Brazil and Uruguay. On Christmas Eve 1974, the Triple A attacked MAASLA’s headquarters in downtown Buenos Aires, killing Raúl Feldman, an Uruguayan exile and the only person in the office at the time.
Feldman had been working to transcribe interviews with Uruguayan torture victims from cassette tapes. These tapes were seized in the attack, together with the bulk of the group’s materials, and the office was destroyed. While MAASLA continued to operate out of a new space in 1975, deteriorating political conditions made the group’s work increasingly dangerous. Two months after Argentina’s own 1976 military coup, MAASLA was formally declared illegal and dissolved.
Accept or reject MAASLA’s nearly monolithic focus on the role of the U.S. in the rise of Latin America’s repressive Right, the bottom line remains the same. At a time of mounting interest in the clandestine activities of the U.S., MAASLA helped to ensure that investigations happening there had repercussions that extended beyond the U.S. itself. Its correspondence and publications, moreover, are valuable tools for contemporary historians seeking to reconstruct a moment at which the transnational dimensions of southern South America’s Cold War-era counterrevolution were coming clearly into focus for the first time.
All of us can agree — I hope — that torture is morally abhorrent. But that does not mean that it has always been understood to be a crime.
Today, it is hard to see beyond the idea that torture is a criminal act and that those responsible for it deserve to be punished. This vision has become so ingrained in international law and political discourse that it can seem both obvious and inevitable.
Yet a half century ago, the criminality of torture was far from self evident. Indeed, many on both the left and the right understood torture not as a criminal violation but as a tactic of war, one to be counteracted through violent confrontation. This framing of torture surfaces again and again in my research, but rarely with the clarity of the 1980 interview with guerrilha fighter Reinaldo Guarani that I encountered yesterday in the archives of Rio de Janeiro’s political police.
Like many of his peers in the leadership of Brazil’s student movement, Reinaldo Guarani grew convinced in the late 1960s that the dictatorship that had seized political power in 1964 could be defeated only through force. So Guarani joined the insurgent group Ação Libertadora Nacional and took up arms against the regime. In 1970, he was captured and interrogated by agents of the country’s joint military-police force, DOI-CODI, who repeatedly tortured him. Guarani was eventually released and expelled from the country. The amnesty law passed in 1979 allowed him to return, and occasioned a striking in-depth interview published in Rio’s Tribuna da Imprensa in June 1980.
The former headquarters of DOI-CODI in Rio [From the Ministério Público Federal]
Asked about his experience with torture, Guarani responded:
The torture phase [of my detention] was nothing new, nothing original. From a sociological point of view, it’s understood: they [DOI-CODI] believed we were at war, and we did too. So, when they captured someone from a clandestine organization, they knew they had little time to extract something new about the group. That’s why they hit us so hard in the face, to uncover a meeting point or a safe house. Then came the torture, pau-de-arara [suspension in a stress position], blows, electric shocks, suffocation, palmatória [beatings to the hand with a metal instrument].
These tortures served a function clear to Guarani: to extract from suspected “subversives” as much information as possible. Knowledge of this purpose, he explains, offered seasoned guerrilheiros limited but still meaningful room for counteraction:
[…T]he guy with a little more experience, instead of revealing a meeting point that was still in use, he’d reveal a cold one. That’d give him a three, four hour break. And because the repressors had to go one way or the other to all the places you mentioned, he could even give another cold one that the police would have to investigate. Back then the activity in the jails was immense, incessant; the torturers had to beat everyone as quickly as they could, so they couldn’t get lost in the details.
In just a few sentences, Guarani brings the reader into a terrifying and violent world, one built not on sadism but on the drive to extract the maximal quantity of information from the largest number of people in the least possible time. The frenetic pace of this world is corroborated by many repressors themselves, who in period documents and subsequent interviews repeatedly emphasized the urgency of the first hours of interrogation and the need for “efficiency” above all else. While Guarani does not play down the horror or the power of the torturers’ violence — even the “experienced” militant has to tell her captors something — his emphasis is on the ability of more skillful guerrilheiros to manipulate their interrogators even under conditions of extreme adversity. Sending agents to disused meeting points didn’t just earn a few hours of rest for the victim, it also bought her comrades critical hours to discover that she had been captured and move to safer ground. Indeed, the security practices of insurgent groups were centered on detained militants’ ability to hold out for a specified period of time — often two days — before revealing any “hot” information that could compromise the group.
Nowhere does Guarani indicate that he was not disgusted by DOI-CODI’s deployment of torture — only that he was not surprised. “They believed we were at war,” he explains, “and we did too.” Torture may have been immoral; it may have been a violation of the law of war. But these questions mattered less to Guarani than torture’s use to those employing it — its specific value, in other words, as a tactic of war. Understanding the counterinsurgent information-gathering ends to which torture was employed could give Guarani and his comrades a bit of space to maneuver, granting them a degree of power they could then turn against the regime.
Guarani’s words make the case at the heart of my dissertation more compellingly than I possibly could. The history of torture cannot simply be the history of our abhorrence of it — or we will miss what repressive violence meant to those who lived it, and to the political struggles within which it was deployed.
Planning has its limits, in historical research as in life. This has never been clearer to me than at the archive where I’ve been spending most of my time these past three months, the Arquivo Público do Estado de São Paulo (APESP), where receiving the wrong box late one Friday afternoon opened a path to understanding a critical but seemingly inaccessible dimension of the past.
APESP, I’ve mentioned before, houses the voluminous files of the state’s political police, the Departamento Estadual de Ordem Política e Social, or DEOPS. Extant from 1924 to 1983, this police force produced hundreds of thousands of pages on groups and individuals linked — according to DEOPS, at least — to communism or other forms of subversion. Miraculously, the documents are open to researchers with virtually no restrictions — beyond, that is, the difficulty of navigating them. Unlike the fully text-searchable Paraguayan police archives to which I dedicated last October, the DEOPS files can be accessed only through the name-based index built by their creators, making it easy to reconstruct, but hard to escape, the repressive logic of DEOPS itself.
Understanding these constraints, I’d arrived with a list of names to follow through the archive. I kept to this plan for the first week, and it yielded some insights. Thanks to the kind suggestions of those who know the files well, I was able to hone in on documents sent to DEOPS from the São Paulo unit of the joint military-police intelligence operations system know as DOI-CODI, responsible for a disproportionate share of the dictatorship’s worst violence. These DOI-CODI files illuminate the counter-revolutionary constructs and operational patterns that guided the repression, but they do little to clarify the meanings of torture for those who lived it most acutely.
At the end of my first week at APESP, however, my archival fortunes took a sharp turn for the better. That Friday, about two hours before closing time, I received a folder one code away from the document I’d requested. As it was already sitting in front of me, I figured it couldn’t hurt to give the folder a quick glance before I took it back.
The contents of the folder didn’t look anything like the documents I had been requesting. Instead of standardized third-person accounts of endless interrogation sessions, it was brimming with hard-to-read copies of notebooks, letters, and pamphlets — papers that DOI-CODI had seized, I soon learned, from the Vanguarda Popular Revolucionária, or VPR. One of the armed revolutionary groups to emerge from the post-coup shakeup of the Brazilian Communist Party, the VRP set out in 1969 to build an insurgent training camp in the south of São Paulo state, led by former Army captain and famed insurgent Carlos Lamarca. The facility, located in the fertile Vale do Ribeira, was operational for ten months. But in May 1970, following leads provided under torture by captured VPR militants, security forces learned of the camp’s location and quickly encircled it with a force of thousands. A small band of militants, including Lamarca, managed to escape, enabling the group to carry on until, battered by ongoing repression, the VPR dissolved itself in 1971.
Lamarca training a VPR militant in the Vale do Ribeira. [From the Comissão da Verdade do Estado de São Paulo.]One of the escapees was Yoshitane Fujimori, who returned to São Paulo to continue organizing. In December 1970, he and fellow guerrilheiro Edson Quaresma were spotted by DOI-CODI operatives and gunned down as they tried to escape in Fujimori’s car. The documents I was looking at, it turned out, had been in the vehicle at the time of the killing. Among them were letters, records of internal debates, self-critical evaluations, and notes from strategy sessions; taken together, they offered an unvarnished look at a persecuted insurgent group’s attempts to counteract and overcome the devastating effects of widespread interrogatory torture.
Given this context, it is hardly surprising that the documents seized from Fujimori’s car paint torture, above all, as a threat — it was, a letter from April 1970 states, the regime’s “most efficient weapon to combat us.” The Vale do Ribeira camp fell, the group understood, because of comrades who had talked under extreme physical duress. These militants had been unable to resist weeks of torture, the VPR concluded, because they had not managed to commit themselves sufficiently to the cause, to fully extinguish the internalized liberalism that led them to treason. Only “daily combat” against the individualistic enemy lurking within could constrain the torturers’ power.
Yet while torture was the dictatorship’s most effective weapon, it was also one that the VPR hoped to turn against the very regime employing it. The group’s most powerful tools for consciousness-building and recruitment, one leader wrote in November 1970, were agitation and propaganda, and nothing made for agitprop like direct accounts of torture. “For example,” the leader wrote, “an agitator could demonstrate at the entrance to a factory, speaking to hundreds of workers, denouncing the brutal repression in the [regime’s] treatment of political prisoners. This should be detailed, citing the most brutal concrete cases, such as the death under torture of a comrade they know.”
The reach of this anti-torture agitprop, the VPR believed, should not be limited to Brazil itself. Some “honest liberals” abroad had begun to investigate systematic torture by the regime, a practice that had deepened in the wake of the December 1968 “coup within a coup” that pushed the dictatorship far to the right. These liberal denunciations were a good sign, another writer posited in October 1970; the regime needed to be attacked on all fronts, and international denunciation of state repression was a promising one. Indeed, as early as June 1970, the VPR had written a report titled “Sequestro e Tortura” (Kidnapping and Torture), to lend further force to the growing wave of condemnation from abroad.
Two hours with these papers on a Friday afternoon were sufficient to convince me that if I wanted to understand what torture meant to the groups grappling with it most immediately, I would have to read more documents like the ones I had just seen. Fortunately, leads have a way of generating more leads, and painstaking work over subsequent months led me to dozens more documents addressing torture, from the VPR as well as several other insurgent groups. These documents include descriptions of organized campaigns to denounce torture at home and abroad, to prepare individual militants to resist it in detention, and to come to grips with its effects once released. They offer, in sum, a window onto understandings of torture that overlapped in certain ways, but differed in many other crucial ones, from those of the “honest liberals” who would soon come to dominate discussions of state violence in Latin America and beyond. All but absent from the academic literature until now, this is a perspective that only period documents can reconstruct — an operation now possible thanks to one of the most fortuitous mistakes to which I’ve ever been party.
I’ve spent the bulk of the past month in the archives of São Paulo’s political police, the Departamento Estadual de Ordem Política e Social (DEOPS, or the State Department of Political and Social Order), in operation from 1924 to 1983. The DEOPS files, transferred to the Arquivo Público do Estado de São Paulo in 1991, look quite like they did when DEOPS ceased to exist. The interrogation reports, confessions, memoranda, and other records are grouped by person/organization of interest and cross-indexed meticulously, though in ways that better suit the repression of “subversion” than, say, the documentation of torture by actors linked to the state.
The DEOPS record room [Photo from APESP]In a future post, I’ll talk more about a particularly exciting subset of the documents I’ve come across — specifically, those produced internally by left-wing insurgent groups and apprehended in military-police raids. For now, however, I’ll just mention one special find from today: a 37-page classified “Dictionary of Terms, Expressions, Names, and Abbreviations Used by Terrorist Subversives,” prepared by DEOPS’ Specialized Delegation of Social Order in December 1973. (By this point in time, nine years into Brazil’s dictatorships and four years past its sharp repressive turn, most revolutionary groups had been thoroughly crushed.) Many of these dictionary entries stand out, often in ways that don’t require much elaboration. I’ll leave a few of them below, so that we can all jump briefly through the looking glass and into the world according to DEOPS.
“DICTATORSHIP – Communist slogan, used to attack a government that does not tolerate subversion” (p. 10)
“HUMAN RIGHTS – Slogan adopted in a campaign undertaken by elements of the subversive left, exclusively in favor of imprisoned comrades, with the aim of attracting, through compassion, the sympathy of the public” (p. 10)
“POLITICAL OPENING – Slogan of the left, with the aim of facilitating the subversive movement” (p. 2)
“TORTURERS – Expression utilized by subversives and by communists in general, to designate those who directly and indirectly effect or contribute to the imprisonment of terrorist subversives” (p. 33)
On Monday, the US Director of National Intelligence delivered the second of at least three tranches of newly declassified government documents concerning Argentina’s 1976-1983 dictatorship. This latest batch seemed to hold greater promise than the first, as its contents are drawn largely from the briefings, memos, and reports prepared for three presidents (and one unusually powerful vice president) by the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence organs. Despite scattered sensationalistic claims in the press, the documents do not appear to include any true bombshells. Indeed, the closest that they come to shocking is their confirmation, reported by the National Security Archive yesterday, that the CIA knew of attempts by agents of the six-country Operation Condor network to assassinate targets in Europe, possibly including human rights activists. (Scholars and journalists have already documented these efforts, though we have never seen such clear proof that the CIA itself knew about them.)
What these documents lack in explosive power, however, they make up for in granularity, illuminating in remarkable detail one aspect of the “intelligence community” (IC) that has received far too little attention: its relationship to the presidency. Then as now, the briefing materials that the CIA and other agencies prepare for the president are key shapers of (sadly still just) his worldview. This dynamic is particularly salient at present, with the incoming president refusing to receive Presidential Daily Briefs and the CIA using charges of Russian election interference to all but openly declare its opposition to Trump. So let’s dig in and take a close look at one particularly interesting document from the tranche: a November 1978 CIA assessment of Southern Cone perceptions of Jimmy Carter’s human rights policy in the region, which in this case includes Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay — five countries led at the time by extraordinarily repressive right-wing authoritarian regimes.
First, though, some background. When it comes to relationships with the IC, Carter is to my mind the most interesting of recent presidents. He came into office having decided, at the tail end of his presidential campaign, to overhaul the United States’ relationship to the world — and its own Vietnam War-bruised self-image — by making human rights the center of US foreign policy. This proved to be a tremendous challenge. While a slice of the State Department, led by Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs Patricia Derian, worked to execute Carter’s promised turn, they met fierce resistance from a foreign relations and security establishment willing to brook little deviance from the “pragmatic” Kissingerian approach of the past. And future, of course — the establishment largely won in the end. Nonetheless, for a few years in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Derian and a band of sympathetic Congressional Democrats did manage to make human rights an issue central to the US’ relationship with the Southern Cone — and, in turn, to the president’s relationship with the IC.
It was within this context that the CIA presented Carter with its November 1978 analysis of Southern Cone reactions to the US emphasis on human rights. Readable in its entirety at the bottom of this post, the memo reveals the subtlety of CIA manipulation at work. Take, for example, the summary that opens the document:
The Southern Cone governments of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay have a somewhat cynical view of US policies toward Latin America. The perspective is shaped by the conviction that Washington’s preoccupation since the mid 1960s with other parts of the world has left the US out of touch with Latin American realities. They view US policy toward their region as inconsistent, incoherent, and unreasonably punitive. There is a strong feeling that in the broader arena the US has been outmaneuvered by the Soviets and is losing its ability to lead the West.
By tying US economic and especially military aid to improvements in civil liberties and detainee treatment, Carter and his allies have fallen “out of touch” with the “realities” of the region — in other words, with the view, long championed by the CIA and by the security establishment at large, that Latin America was at risk of falling into Soviet hands, a risk that only strong (and bloody) leadership could mitigate. The risks are so great that in the next two sentences the report’s authors go right for the jugular, labeling Carter’s policies not only “inconsistent” and “incoherent,” but indicative of a broader failure of the US to keep the USSR in line and effectively “lead the West.”
But wait, you might object, isn’t the CIA simply relaying the perceptions of others? Indeed — and therein lies the very brilliance of the report. By channeling the voices of their stated subjects (the title promises an approximation of “Southern Cone perceptions,” after all), the memo’s authors can deliver a damning critique of U.S. foreign policy without appearing insubordinate, and thereby maximize their chances of countering opponents like Derian.
Nonetheless, the authors’ voice slips through at times – though they can be hard to spot, given how little they depart from the regimes’ own perspectives. For instance, in discussing an upcoming UN vote concerning Chile, the memo’s authors explain that “the Chileans will be interested in the US vote on the UN Human Rights Committee’s attempt to provide funds to ‘victims’ of Chilean human rights violations.” The word “victims” surrounded by quotation marks stands out as an inadvertent revelation, suggesting the authors’ skepticism as to the status of these individuals, then denounced as terrorists by regime sympathizers.
The authors then turn to broader Chilean frustrations with the US, noting that Chile’s leaders
…believe that there is a small coterie in Washington that is actively working to undermine the Pinochet regime. They find it incomprehensible that the US does not realize that the stringent government controls in Chile were a necessary course of action after the overthrow of the Marxist Allende regime.
By “stringent government controls,” the authors mean, of course, the extrajudicial execution of some 3,000 and the torture of many thousands more.
Such abuses, however, are never enumerated in the report. Instead, the authors include list after eulogistic list of the many human rights improvements made by these regimes in recent years. These improvements are the only exception to the otherwise unfailingly negative tone of the memo. Indeed, while Southern Cone states are clearly upset about Carter’s approach to diplomacy,
This does not mean that US human rights policy has had a completely negative impact on the area. On the contrary, police and military officials in these countries are now sensitized to human rights considerations. Every chief of state in the area claims to have made clear to his subordinates that torture and arbitrary arrest will no longer be tolerated. All of these countries have shown general improvement during the past year in their treatment of prisoners.
The CIA has eyes and ears across the continent; while it can report honesty that every regional leader now “claims” to have told police and military officials to stop torturing, it cannot possibly have believed that these statements carried the weight of truth. Yet rather than question these purported advances, the authors find an altogether distinct concern to raise. Southern Cone governments feel, they explain, that “these improvements go unacknowledged by Washington, and moreover, the torrent of criticism, adversary treatment, and antagonistic US legislation has continued.” The implication is clear; Congressional Democrats and the White House need to reward “these improvements” by loosening human rights-based restrictions and drawing valuable allies closer to the US.
The worldview undergirding this implication comes most clearly into focus in the report’s most fascinating section, “Public Views of US Policies.” While conceding the difficulty of getting an accurate view of public sentiment in the Southern Cone, the authors nonetheless claim that “most citizens seem to support the military governments; the rest are either unconcerned with politics or belong to a declared opposition.”“Judging from newspaper commentary and personal conversations,” moreover, “US human rights policy has had little impact on the general populace.”
This characterization of public sentiments may indeed by correct; what littleresearch has been done on the question suggests that the region’s dictatorships did indeed enjoy substantial popular backing, especially from the middle and upper classes. Yet the CIA memo includes no discussion of the factors that could have contributed to such sentiments, questions of great relevance to US policymaking. Southern Cone dictatorships worked hard to exaggerate the threat posed by armed insurgents already decimated by repression, limit access to information concerning abuses, and terrify those who might think to step out of line and publicly criticize the regime. Those who dared to do so nonetheless receive no credit in the CIA’s discussion of “public views”; instead, they are cast uniformly — and suspiciously — as members of the “declared opposition.” Indeed, the authors continue, “some political groups that have long opposed the various governments and other groups representing civil and human rights causes have used the policy to air their own specific grievances. Liberal clergy have also cited the policy as being similar to their own programs.” If you’re familiar with the CIA of the 1970s, you’ll know that dissent is only celebrated east of the Iron Curtain, and “liberal clergy” is a phrase never uttered admiringly. The implicit criticism of these characterizations is echoed later in the report, in the authors’ contention that Chile’s longstanding opposition political parties “view US human rights policy as made to order for their own campaign against the government.”
“Their own campaign,” “declared opposition” — these are phrases designed to emphasize that by failing to appreciate the complex political realities of the Southern Cone, Carter is playing the stooge, allowing the US to serve the interests of those who aren’t likely to put Washington’s needs front and center. Reading this sustained but ingeniously packages assault on the coherence and effectiveness of Carter’s human rights policy, I can’t help but wonder: when its authors note, toward the middle of the report, a “growing opinion in Brazil that the US has lost or is losing its resolve and even some of its capacity as a world power,” might they really have meant to say, in the CIA?
More than two weeks have passed since I arrived in São Paulo, marking this afternoon as high time for the first of what I promised would be many updates punctuating a year and a half of primary research abroad. Fortunately for the world’s stock of optimism, today’s brief note brims with nothing but positivity for what I have experienced so far here in Brazil. (And with the infestation of fleas that greeted me at my first Sampa apartment rental still rather fresh in my mind, this is perhaps a stronger statement than might, on its face, be apparent.)
In fairness, I fell in love with this country on my first archival visit to Rio and São Paulo in the (northern) summer of 2014, so the joys of these two weeks have come as little surprise. And any country that brings together tropical fruit, strong coffee, and top-notch Levantine dips is running strong out of the gate.
See what I mean?
Nonetheless, I have been bowled over by the truly spectacular generosity of the professors and graduate students whom I have met in this decidedly more focused phase of research. In only two weeks, I have received two invitations to lunch, one to dinner, another to a senior scholar’s birthday party, an MA thesis’ worth of bibliographic references, a standing offer for a ride to the University of Campinas (a graduate-focused university an hour and a half outside the city, with which I am affiliated here), and more emails of introduction than I can count on two hands. That these many kindnesses have been extended against the backdrop of this country’s stomach-churning, and ever-deepening, slow-motion coup has only strengthened my sense that I am, at present, exactly where I ought to be.
More soon on the research itself. For now, though, just a small expression of gratitude for the bounteous magnanimity that makes this work not simply possible, but a pleasure.
